DISCUSSION: Have you ever had to boot somebody from a game?

Have you ever had to boot somebody from a game or a group? What caused it? How did you go about disinviting the person? How did they react?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

There was one guy who booted himself. He had weird extreme anger issues, though.

He was sharing a pirated PDF of one of my friends’ books at our gaming group. I politely asked him not to, and he quite literally exploded in an orgy of pure rage, calling me all sorts of naughty words. It was quite extraordinary behaviour. But he booted himself; while I wouldn’t associate with somebody after they’d treated me like that, he saved me the decision.

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Yes. During homebrew had a friend who a good person to play beside. But as soon as I dmed he was 80% of the problem. Told him was welcome to game night but not if I was dming.
Had a player pull the 1E phb out and started to cast spells from it. We were playing 5E and he was not kidding. Same player got a 4 week ban. I told him he was charmed because he failed his save vs a mantrap flower (which makes want to walk into the flower) and wanted to smell the nice flower. He tired to take other actions.
Edit add monster and failed saved.

I have and it wasn't very difficult. The individual would make borderline character concept characters and then push the buttons of other players. We would rotate meal makers/bringers (meal, drinks, desert, etc), and while we provided home cooked meals or quality meals from restaurants, they would provide entirely bottom of the barrel in quality items. We simply got tired of choking down lousy food and putting up with a group member clubbing social baby seals on a weekly basis.

jasper said:

Same player got a 4 week ban. I told him he was charmed and want to smell the nice flower. He tired to take other actions.

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What does that mean?

I have a player that I'd love to boot, shows up late every session, has trouble understanding the most basic rules, round by round forgets how many times he can attack and what his character can actually do mechanically, etc. Why? Because he puts no effort into the game, hes been gaming with us on and off for 20 years but I think mostly its just something to do at this point. Problem is I kick him and I probably lose his two brothers and maybe the entire group.

I was a member of a group that wanted to boot our host, so we had to find a new home for our game first.

It was sort of a shame, the host's place was central, and we liked playing with his wife.

Morrus said:

There was one guy who booted himself. He had weird extreme anger issues, though.

He was sharing a pirated PDF of one of my friends’ books at our gaming group. I politely asked him not to, and he quite literally exploded in an orgy of pure rage, calling me all sorts of naughty words. It was quite extraordinary behaviour. But he booted himself; while I wouldn’t associate with somebody after they’d treated me like that, he saved me the decision.

Click to expand...

That's usually a mental health thing. I have some friends who have that, to varying extents. It can get better, and I'll put up with it because they can be really awesome people, and I just sorta write off the occasional explosions. But it's also reasonable to just nope out of dealing.

Usually the problem players self-boots themselves. They'll reveal themselves to be incompatible with the rest of the group, act oddly, & announce (with varied degrees of drama) that they're quitting.
Sometimes though we have to break the news to someone that we're dropping them.

The most recent player we had to do this with was a high school kid (17? 18?) who had joined our ToA game at the local shop.
I can accommodate up to 7 players, so I don't have anything against adding brand new players to my shop game as long as there's an open chair. And we get a fair # high school students rotating through who can only stay for about 3/4 of a session. That's OK, we understand. So you can't die in my game unless you're present & we'll give you a quick recap of what you missed next session.
This kid though....
He wouldn't bother to read/understand the rules,
He cycled through characters at the rate of about 1 per session due to getting them killed - because he wouldn't understand the rules, this led to constantly having to work a new character in.
He'd get pretty angry when the rules he refused to understand (that everyone else is playing by & trying to explain to him) prevented his actions/success,
He proved fairly obnoxious & foul mouthed,
Paid little attention to anything other than whatever he was concerned with atm (including the recap of what he'd missed last time when he had to leave - but was always asking what was going on/what he'd missed),
And he never shut up. He would just over talk anyone, any time. Often about things completely unrelated. Didn't matter if they were already speaking or what they were saying.

After about a month & a half of this the other players had had enough. So one session after he'd lost yet another random character & left we decided it was time for him to go.

A few days later when I saw him there at the shop & just told him straight up that the group wasn't enjoying playing with him, why, and that he wasn't invited back to the game.
I suggested that he look into joining one of the other games being run at the shop (there's 3 or 4 other groups)

His response was "Oh, Ok."

Since then he's been booted out of every other RPG game & is only accepted by the Pokémon players (who are a really mixed lot to put it politely)